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Decentralised social media platform has carried out the first payout to content providers and curators. The sum totals to 10% of Steem’s current market cap.

Early adopters of Steemit, a rapid-growing social media site based on the blockchain technology, received the first reward for their contribution. The payout of $1.3 mln fell on Independence Day in the US.

“This was an opportunity for us to thank our growing community, to reward them for building a sustainable ecosystem that’s much more than the sum of its parts,” Steemit CEO Ned Scott said in a press release.

The payout was provided 50/50 in Steem Dollars, the native cryptocurrency units worth roughly one US Dollar, and Steem Power that enhances voting abilities on the platform.

According to Steemit, the number of its registered users has doubled in June, after a record-breaking 1600% growth in May. The platform plans to introduce some new features in the near future, such as an embeddable Steemit button for sharing the content throughout the internet. During the next 12 months, the platform developers are going to launch side chain plugins allowing to create a decentralised app-store “similar in appearance to Facebook or Google’s, but based on decentralized, provably-fair technologies and new business models.”

Steem is an incentivised, blockchain-based social media platform, as defined in its white paper published in March 2016. It focuses on the freedom of speech, elimination of advertising from social media and rewarding of users who create high-quality content or act as curators, and thus ensure that the platform offers its readers a worthwhile experience. Steemit.com Beta was started in May 2016, and the public launch of the platform in scheduled for July, which will be accompanied by a wide-scale promotion campaign for the service and related signup bonus and referral program.